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166 The Kentucky Anthology John Fox Jr. “Through the Gap” John Fox Jr. was from the Bluegrass country (he was born in 1862 at Stony Point, in Bourbon County), but he took his literary material from the Kentucky mountains, which he explored in the mid-1880s when he accompanied his father and brother on visits to their mining interests in the Cumberland Mountains. He began to study the folklife of the mountain people and write stories about them. After James Lane Allen read the draft of one of Fox’s stories, he encouraged him to complete it and send it to Century Magazine. “A Mountain Europa,” which appeared in two installments in 1892, became his first publication. He received a check for $262, a princely amount for those times. Two of his novels, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), as well as a number of his short stories are still widely and enthusiastically read. “Through the Gap” is an apt introduction to the strange ways of the hill people. It is a comedy of mountain manners that almost becomes a tragedy. The dark-skinned Malungians (also Melungians) in the story are thought to be descendants of Portuguese immigrants who were early settlers in the southern mountains of Kentucky. (Jesse Stuart wrote a novel, Daughter of the Legend, which is a sympathetic treatment of these misunderstood people.) h When thistles go adrift, the sun sets down the valley between the hills; when snow comes, it goes down behind the Cumberland and streams through a great fissure that people call the Gap. Then the last light drenches the parson ’s cottage under Imboden Hill, and leaves an after-glow of glory on a majestic heap that lies against the east. Sometimes it spans the Gap with a rainbow. Strange people and strange tales come through this Gap from the Kentucky hills. Through it came these two, late one day—a man and a woman— afoot. I met them at the footbridge over Roaring Fork. “Is thar a preacher anywhar aroun’ hyeh?” he asked. I pointed to the cottage under Imboden Hill. The girl flushed slightly and turned her head away with a rather unhappy smile. Without a word, the mountaineer led the way towards town. A moment more and a half-breed Malungian passed me on the bridge and followed them. At dusk the next day I saw the mountaineer chopping wood at a shanty under a clump of rhododendron on the river-bank. The girl was cooking 166 John Fox Jr. 167 supper inside. The day following he was at work on the railroad, and on Sunday, after church, I saw the parson. The two had not been to him. Only that afternoon the mountaineer was on the bridge with another woman, hideously rouged and with scarlet ribbons fluttering from her bonnet. Passing on by the shanty, I saw the Malungian talking to the girl. She apparently paid no heed to him until, just as he was moving away, he said something mockingly, and with a nod of his head back towards the bridge. She did not look up even then, but her face got hard and white, and, looking back from the road, I saw her slipping through the bushes into the dry bed of the creek, to make sure that what the half-breed told her was true. The two men were working side by side on the railroad when I saw them again, but on the first pay-day the doctor was called to attend the Malungian, whose head was split open with a shovel. I was one of two who went out to arrest his assailant, and I had no need to ask who he was. The mountaineer was a devil, the foreman said, and I had to club him with a pistol-butt before he would give in. He said he would get even with me; but they all say that, and I paid no attention to the threat. For a week he was kept in the calaboose , and when I passed the shanty just after he was sent to the county-seat for trial, I found it empty. The Malungian, too, was gone. Within a fortnight the mountaineer was in the door of the shanty again. Having no accuser, he had been discharged. He went back to his work, and if he opened his lips I never knew. Every day I saw him at work, and...

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